Strategic spatial selection of marine ecosystem indicator sites to monitor a complex coastal environment

Given the rate of modern biodiversity loss, implementing ecosystem-based management (EBM) approaches to negate the effects of human activities on the biosphere is becoming increasingly critical. Unfortunately, many management bodies lack data for full ecosystem-modelling approaches, and EBM hinges on monitoring frameworks using ecosystem indicators which are often designed at spatial and temporal scales that may produce misleading signals. Here we draw meso-scale regions based on boundaries of oceanographic features in an environment undergoing extensive climate-driven environmental modification coupled with human usage, the Antarctic Peninsula, as the foundation of a monitoring framework designed to disentangle human-induced signals from natural environmental variation and intra- and inter-specific competition. We use population distribution and demographic data combined with known information on the at-sea movement characteristics of a key bioindicator taxa in the region to assess the spatial coverage of breeding colonies as candidate monitoring sites for each meso-scale region.  We further assess these candidate sites in the context of their ease of access using different forms of infrastructure. We find that the current distribution of monitoring sites in this region is too coarse to reflect ecological changes at scales relevant to the monitoring objectives. Finally, we discuss the biases introduced when monitoring boundaries do not account for spatial heterogeneity, the difference in information provided by demographic and behavioural indicator metrics, and how integrating such a monitoring framework will support ecosystem-based management in oceanographically complex coastal regions.